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Filming A Thousand Lovers was one of the most joyful experiences I've had in my art career, which has spanned over a decade now. Prior to moving to NZ, I showed a lot of work in Museums and Galleries across Europe, and other parts of the world. My focus was the way the media constructs reality via the use of symbolic imagery and visual, conceptual metaphors. I was particularly centred on war, how war and violence are part of our media programming for 'normality'. Once I moved to NZ a few years ago, those themes became less and less real to me, living so far from the rest of the world, feeling that glorious isolation and distance that seems to be part of living here. I started making work about our more beatific, though still complex subjects like love, sex, romance and meaning, and yes the way the media habitually and cleverly represent those highly significant areas to a largely accepting public. I made a feature length film with short 'chapters' in a philosophical film essay style, called ' Love & Dreaming' that I showed several times in different formats in the last few years. This was featured in the ARTBOX pop up gallery on the Queen's Wharf last year too, and had an interactive component added. This was a simple 'post box' for people to 'mail' the 'letters they wished they had sent'.. I was overwhelmed by the response to the exhibition and to the interactive request. I received over 500 letters from an Auckland and international public that clearly had big emotions, much heartache, huge love, loss, lust and longing. I picked 24 of the 'letters', photographed them, and they are featured in the downstairs space of the Britomart Station for ArtWeek. 

 

A further interactive work, which grew from the Love&Dreaming installation is this current piece, 'A Thousand Lovers', named after the Maori word for Auckland Tamaki Makarau, which means 'the land of a thousand lovers' I loved this name when I first researched the history of Auckland, and that this narrow strip of land, so strategic in pre and post settler NZ history, had such a poetic title. I had also been struck by the deep, if repressed, emotions of the NZ public who responded to my earlier installations, and had noticed that Auckland had a huge international population with couples of mixed cultural backgrounds more the norm than the exception, as it is in many parts of the world. 

 

As a human who truly considers herself a global citizen, with 18 country moves in my life until I settled here in NZ with my family, and an eclectic, peripatetic past, moving every two years or so, I have never felt uniquely anything. My parents may be Scottish, but I only ever lived there a few years, as an adult, and I have also lived in America, Belgium, Spain, France, Bosnia&Croatia, Norway, England for example. This highly unusual background means that I never stayed anywhere long enough to feel 'my country, my town, my people… are unique, special, better than other countries, deserving of special grace or favour, worth killing or dying for' . Instead I feel connected to the whole world, I feel like a human first, an artist, creative, woman and mother next, and there simply isn't a sense of religion or cultural precedence. I went to schools of all kinds, in different languages, and learned that history, and many other subjects, are taught very differently in every place. 

 

I learned that 'normality' is often just 'what we know', and that people are truly basically the same everywhere, only more or less ethnocentric, judgemental and warlike. I found that love is love wherever you go, that families are families, and that everyone loves their children and wishes for a better, safer, kinder world. I also learned that people all around the world can be extraordinarily loving, kind, tolerant, giving, hopeful, charming, funny and silly, all great qualities. Of all the countries I've lived in, NZ is the first that has really held me, and it has transformed me in many ways. The extraordinary expanses of empty, soulful beaches and mountains, bush and sky, the good heartedness of your everyday kiwi, the cultural egalitarianism that extends so far as to have created a counter 'tall poppy syndrome' which seeks to balance everyone, the small population relative to the beautiful land, the tendency therefore to forgive when in other cultures it is easier to hold grudges, or abandon, all this has given me more peace and hope than I have felt in other places. It is not that NZ is perfect, but that it has a middle ground of common decency and respect that is striking, as well as, in Auckland at least, a stunningly culturally mixed populace, who live together peaceably and with respect. 

 

As I researched love and multiculturalism, I came to think of the Kiss as the greatest symbolic gesture of union I could work with. The kiss has been largely stolen by TV, advertising, porn, hollywood, as they use kisses that are more sexual or 'romantic' than real. This is also not a very demonstrative public culture, and I missed the explosive beauty of Italian lovers for example, unembarrassed to kiss on the street, or French couples who stroke each others faces publicly, showing love in lust or tenderness, but without the inhibitions of Kiwi culture. I decided to set up my pop up gallery on the Queen's Wharf as a photo/film studio and invite passersby in couples to come in and kiss! I was so uncertain of the inhibited NZ public that I advertised as well, for kissing couples. In the end though, out of nearly 90 couples who came in to the studio to kiss, about only 10 of them were from my online call out! The rest were people passing through the Queen's Wharf on their way to work, to exhibitions in The Cloud, to the Britomart, to lunch or ferries. To my surprise and joy, people self selected, only coming in to kiss if they were patently in happy relationships. I had a set of 'rules' that developed over the interactive shoots, and one was that they not 'act' for the cameras, that they could be natural, kiss slowly or laugh, or be silly or be passionate. I was so moved that people trusted me, that they opened up to me in person, and on camera, with great joy and passion and a huge amount of hilarity. The situation was so unusual for them that giggles were often the first or last part of the filming, and I edited the little clips with some of those 'outtakes' because I felt that people's great love for each other was often shown in these parts as well. 

 

I had couples who had only been together two days, right through to couples who'd been together over 44 years! I had people from all different cultures, in mixed couples, or mono cultural couples, and I realised as I filmed and met these great open hearted people, that love is a tangible force, that all these couples wandering around auckland, maybe holding hands, maybe just walking fast to an appointment, love each other adoringly, love their children (some chose to bring their children in to kiss too), and love their lives. It was so emotional in the end, as this love is normally hidden, and the love we see on our screens night after night does not capture this genuine, profound affection, desire, and respect, that I experienced in the ARTBOX. 

 

As the first interactive events on the Wharf received some press attention, I also started to get emails from people around the country, who want to celebrate and testify to their great love for each other, by taking part in this project. I hope to find funding to travel around and gather more kisses from other parts of NZ. I came to realise that Auckland is still a hub of many lovers, but that the whole country, the whole world, is connected through this invisible network of love, these invisible seams that hold us together. I thought intensely about the 'norms' of beauty that are thrown at us daily in advertising, TV, movies and I became aware, filming these people kissing, that everyone is made beautiful by love, that love shines out of the flesh like a light in the darkness, and is far greater than we are individually. During the edit of the films, I watched my individual kissing couples many times, and I came to know their love for each other very well. I noticed an unconscious secret language of love, through tiny gestures, through micro-expressions, through a subtle dance of the bodies that often moved, unconsciously, in time with each other. It was a privilege and a joy to be given a tiny window into peoples relationships, diverse as they were, there was this common thread of happiness running through. 

 

I am a utopian idealist by nature, and I dream of a world that remembers and recognises these often hidden truths; nothing defines us more than how and who we love. At the end of your life, you will not remember the cool films you watched, or the TV shows that you enjoyed, or the products you bought or the clothes you wore, you will remember, and be remembered by the love you experienced and shared. This installation is the first of a series of interactive public filming and photographing along different, but life enhancing themes. Watch this space and contact me if you want to get involved: ) Thank you from the heart to all the beautiful people who came into an unknown, unexpected space, and trusted a kooky stranger to capture their souls a little bit, and had the courage to allow me to share that with the public. 

 

ARTIST STATEMENT

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